Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (270 page)

She sat quiet for a minute as they drove away, relieved and yet full of awe. Anthony Harker was twenty-two, handsome, popular and sought after--and how he had loved her--so much that he had to go away. She was as impressed as if they had been two other people.

Taking her silence for depression, Ed Bement said:

“Well, it did one thing anyhow--it stopped that other story they had around about you.”

She turned to him quickly. “What story?”

“Oh, just some crazy story.”

“What was it?” she demanded.

“Oh, nothing much,” he said hesitantly, “but there was a story around last August that you and Travis de Coppet were married.”

“Why, how perfectly terrible!” she exclaimed. “Why, I never heard of such a lie. It--” She stopped herself short of saying the truth--that though she and Travis had adventurously driven twenty miles to New Ulm, they had been unable to find a minister willing to marry them. It all seemed ages behind her, childish, forgotten.

“Oh, how perfectly terrible!” she repeated. “That’s the kind of story that gets started by jealous girls.”

“I know,” agreed Ed. “I’d just like to hear any boy try to repeat it to me. Nobody believed it anyhow.”

It was the work of ugly and jealous girls. Ed Bement, aware of her body next to him, and of her face shining like fire through the half darkness, knew that nobody so beautiful could ever do anything really wrong.

A NICE QUIET PLACE

I

All that week she couldn’t decide whether she was a lollipop or a roman candle--through her dreams, dreams that promised uninterrupted sleep through many vacation mornings, drove a series of long, incalculable murmuring in tune with the put-put-put of their cut-outs, “I love you--I love you,” over and over. She wrote in the evening:

Dear Ridge: When I think of not being able to come to the freshman dance with you this June, I could lie down and
die,
but mother is sort of narrow-minded in some ways, and she feels that sixteen is too young to go to a prom; and Lil Hammel’s mother feels the same way. When I think of you dancing around with
some other girl
and hear you handing her a line, like you do to everybody, I could lie down and
scream.
Oh, I
know--
because a girl here at school met you after I left Hot Springs at Easter. Anyhow, if you start rushing some other kid when you come out to Ed Bement’s house party this summer, I intend to
cut her throat,
or my own, or something desperate. And probably no one will even be sorry I’m dead. Ha-ha--

Summer, summer, summer--bland inland sun and friendly rain. Lake Forest, with its thousand enchanted verandas, the dancing on the outdoor platform at the club, and always the boys, centaurs, in new cars. Her mother came East to meet her, and as they walked together out of the Grand Central Station, the symphony of promise became so loud that Josephine’s face was puckered and distorted, as with the pressure of strong sunshine.

“We’ve got the best plans,” her mother said.

“Oh, what? What, mother?”

“A real change. I’ll tell you all about it when we get to the hotel.”

There was a sudden discord; a shadow fell upon Josephine’s heart.

“What do you mean? Aren’t we going to Lake Forest?”

“Some place much better”--her mother’s voice was alarmingly cheerful. “I’m saving it till we get to the hotel.”

Before Mrs. Perry had left Chicago, she and Josephine’s father had decided, from observations of their own and some revelations on the part of their elder daughter, Constance, that Josephine knew her way around Lake Forest all too well. The place had changed in the twenty years that it had been the summer rendezvous of fashionable Chicago; less circumscribed children of new families were resoundingly in evidence and, like most parents, Mrs. Perry thought of her daughter as one easily led into mischief by others. The more impartial eyes of other members of the colony had long regarded Josephine herself as the principal agent of corruption. But, preventive or penalty, the appalling thing to Josephine was that the Perrys were going to a “nice quiet place” this summer.

“Mother, I simply can’t go to Island Farms. I simply--”

“Father feels--”

“Why don’t you take me to a reform school if I’m so awful? Or to state’s penitentiary? I simply can’t go to a horrible old farm with a lot of country jakes and no fun and no friends except a lot of hicks.”

“But, dear, it’s not like that at all. They just call it Island Farms. In fact, your aunt’s place isn’t a farm; it’s really a nice little resort up in Michigan where lots of people spend the summer. Tennis and swimming and--and fishing.”

“Fishing?” repeated Josephine incredulously. “Do you call
that
something to do?” She shook her head in mute incomprehension. “I’ll just be forgotten, that’s all. When it’s my year to come out nobody will know who I am. They’ll just say, ‘Who in heck is this Josephine Perry? I never saw her around here.’ ‘Oh, she’s just some hick from a horrible old farm up in Michigan. Let’s not invite her.’ Just when everybody else is having a wonderful time--”

“Nobody’ll forget you in one summer, dear.”

“Yes, they will. Everybody’ll have new friends and know new dances, and I’ll be up there in the backwoods, full of hayseed, forgetting everything I know. If it’s so wonderful why isn’t Constance coming?”

Lying awake in their drawing-room on the Twentieth Century, Josephine brooded upon the terrible injustice of it all. She knew that her mother was going on her account, and mostly because of the gossip of a few ugly and jealous girls. These ugly and jealous girls, her relentless enemies, were not entirely creatures of Josephine’s imagination. There was something in the frank sensuousness of her beauty that plain women found absolutely intolerable; they stared at her in a frightened, guarded way.

It was only recently that gossip had begun to worry Josephine. Her own theory was that, though at thirteen or fourteen she had been “speedy”--a convenient word that lacked the vulgar implication of “fast”--she was now trying to do her best, and a difficult enough business it was, without the past being held against her; for the only thing she cared about in the world was being in love and being with the person she currently loved.

Toward midnight her mother spoke to her softly and found that she was asleep. Turning on the berth light, she looked for a moment at the flushed young face, smoothed now of all its disappointment by a faint, peculiar smile. She leaned over and kissed Josephine’s brow, behind which, doubtless, were passing in review those tender and eagerly awaited orgies of which she was to be deprived this summer.

II

Into Chicago, resonant with shrill June clamor; out to Lake Forest, where her friends moved already in an aura of new boys, new tunes, parties and house parties yet to be. One concession was granted her--she was to come back from Island Farms in time for Ed Bement’s house party--which is to say, for Ridgeway Saunders’ visit, the first of September.

Then northward, leaving all gayety behind, to the nice quiet place, implicit in its very station, which breathed no atmosphere of hectic arrivals or feverish partings: there was her aunt, her fifteen-year-old cousin, Dick, with the blank resentful stare of youth in spectacles, there were the dozen or so estates with tired people asleep inside them and the drab village three miles away. It was worse, even, than Josephine had imagined; to her the vicinity was literally unpopulated, for, as a representative of her generation, she stood alone. In despair, she buried herself in ceaseless correspondence with the outer world or, as a variant, played tennis with Dick and carried on a slow indifferent quarrel at his deliberately spiteful immaturity.

“Are you going to be this way always?” she demanded, breaking down at his stupidity one day. “Can’t you do anything about it? Does it hurt?”

“What way?” Dick shambled around the tennis net in the way that so offended her.

“Oh, such a pill! You ought to be sent away to some good school.”

“I am going to be.”

“Why, at your age most of the boys in Chicago have cars of their own.”

“Too many,” he responded.

“How do you mean?” Josephine flared up.

“I heard my aunt say there was too much of that there. That’s why they made you come up here. You’re too much for that sort of thing.”

Josephine flushed. “Couldn’t you
help
being such a pill, if you honestly tried?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Dick. “I don’t even think that maybe I
am
one.”

“Oh, yes, you are. I can assure you of that.”

It occurred to her, not very hopefully, that under proper supervision something might be made of him. Perhaps she could teach him to dance or have him learn to drive his mother’s car. She went to the extent of trying to smarten him up, to make him wash his hands bidiurnally and to soak his hair and cleave it down the middle. She suggested that he would be more beautiful without his spectacles, and he obediently bumped around without them for several afternoons. But when he developed a feverish headache one night and confessed to his mother why he had been “so utterly insane,” Josephine gave him up without a pang.

But she could have cared for almost anyone. She wanted to hear the mystical terminology of love, to feel the lift and pull inside herself that each one of a dozen affairs had given her. She had written, of course, to Ridgeway Saunders. He answered. She wrote again. He answered--but after two weeks. On the first of August, with one month gone and one to go, came a letter from Lillian Hammel, her best friend in Lake Forest.

Dearest Jo: You said to write you every single thing, and I will, but some of it will be sort of a fatal blow to you--about Ridgeway Saunders. Ed Bement visited him in Philadelphia, and he says he is so crazy about a girl there that he wants to leave Yale and get married. Her name is Evangeline Ticknor and she was fired from Foxcroft last year for smoking; quite a speed and said to be beautiful and something like you, from what I hear. Ed said that Ridgeway was so crazy about her that he wouldn’t even come out here in September unless Ed invited her, too; so Ed did. Probably a lot you care! You’ve probably had lots of crushes up there where you are, or aren’t there any attractive boys--

Josephine walked slowly up and down her room. Her parents had what they wanted now; the plot against her was complete. For the first time in her life she had been thrown over, and by the most attractive, the most desirable boy she had ever known, cut out by a girl “very much like herself.” Josephine wished passionately that she had been fired from school--then the family might have given up and let her alone.

She was not so much humiliated as full of angry despair, but for the sake of her pride, she had a letter to write immediately. Her eyes were bright with tears as she began:

Dearest Lil: I was not surprised when I heard that about R. S. I knew he was fickle and never gave him a second
thought
after school closed in June. As a matter of fact, you know how fickle I am myself, darling, and you can imagine that I haven’t had time to let it worry
me.
Everybody has a right to do what they want, sayI. Live and let live is my motto. I wish you could have been here this summer. More
wonderful
parties--

She paused, knowing that she should invent more circumstantial evidence of gayety. Pen in air, she gazed out into the deep, still mass of northern trees. Inventing was delicate work, and having dealt always in realities, her imagination was ill-adapted to the task. Nevertheless, after several minutes a vague, synthetic figure began to take shape in her mind. She dipped the pen and wrote: “One of the darlingest--” hesitated and turned again for inspiration to the window.

Suddenly she started and bent forward, the tears drying in her eyes. Striding down the road, not fifty feet from her window, was the handsomest, the most fascinating boy she had ever seen in her life.

III

He was about nineteen and tall, with a blond viking head; the fresh color in his slender, almost gaunt cheeks was baked warm and dry by the sun. She had a glimpse of his eyes--enough to know that they were “sad” and of an extraordinary glistening blue. His model legs were in riding breeches, above which he wore a soft sweater jacket of blue chamois, and as he walked he swung a crop acrimoniously at the overhanging leaves.

For a moment the vision endured; then the path turned into a clump of trees and he was gone, save for the small crunch of his boots on the pine needles.

Josephine did not move. The dark green trees that had seemed so lacking in promise were suddenly like a magic wall that had opened and revealed a short cut to possible delight; the trees gave forth a great trembling rustle. For another instant she waited; then she threw herself at the unfinished letter:

--he usually wears the best-looking riding clothes. He has the
most
beautiful eyes. On top he usually wears a blue chamois thing that is simply
divine.

IV

When her mother came in, half an hour later, she found Josephine getting into her best afternoon dress with an expression that was at once animated and far away.

“I thought--” she said. “I don’t suppose you’d want to come with me and pay a few calls?”

“I’d adore to,” said Josephine unexpectedly.

Her mother hesitated. “I’m afraid it’s been a rather stupid month for you. I didn’t realize that there wouldn’t be anyone your age. But something nice has happened that I can’t tell you about yet, and perhaps I’ll soon have some news for you.”

Josephine did not appear to hear.

“Who shall we call on?” she demanded eagerly. “Let’s just call on everybody, even if it takes until ten o’clock tonight. Let’s start at the nearest house and just keep going until we’ve killed everybody off.”

“I don’t know whether we can do that.”